Pamintuan’s caricature-style portraits of exaggeratedly sinuous, muscular players in action are a hoot, but this baseball abecedarium is sabotaged by a bush-league text. Not only does Spradlin display clumsy prose—closing his comment on T for “Tag” with the claim that a fielder “must step on the base with the ball in his glove before the runner does”—he doesn’t even get his baseball facts straight: No, a knuckleball isn’t gripped with the knuckles (the accompanying pictures shows the correct grip), nor does the pitch have “a crazy spin when thrown” (its distinctive action is achieved by giving the ball no spin at all). There are plenty of better-written and at least somewhat more systematic baseball alphabets to get young readers primed for Opening Day—H Is for Home Run, by Brad Herzog and illustrated by Melanie Rose (2004), and B Is for Baseball, by Lisa McGuinness (2009), for example. This one’s an easy out. (Informational picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: March 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-124081-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
Scotton makes a stylish debut with this tale of a sleepless sheep—depicted as a blocky, pop-eyed, very soft-looking woolly with a skinny striped nightcap of unusual length—trying everything, from stripping down to his spotted shorts to counting all six hundred million billion and ten stars, twice, in an effort to doze off. Not even counting sheep . . . well, actually, that does work, once he counts himself. Dawn finds him tucked beneath a rather-too-small quilt while the rest of his flock rises to bathe, brush and riffle through the Daily Bleat. Russell doesn’t have quite the big personality of Ian Falconer’s Olivia, but more sophisticated fans of the precocious piglet will find in this art the same sort of daffy urbanity. Quite a contrast to the usual run of ovine-driven snoozers, like Phyllis Root’s Ten Sleepy Sheep, illustrated by Susan Gaber (2004). (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-059848-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Blandly inspirational fare made to evoke equally shrink-wrapped responses.
An NBA star pays tribute to the influence of his grandfather.
In the same vein as his Long Shot (2009), illustrated by Frank Morrison, this latest from Paul prioritizes values and character: “My granddad Papa Chilly had dreams that came true,” he writes, “so maybe if I listen and watch him, / mine will too.” So it is that the wide-eyed Black child in the simply drawn illustrations rises early to get to the playground hoops before anyone else, watches his elder working hard and respecting others, hears him cheering along with the rest of the family from the stands during games, and recalls in a prose afterword that his grandfather wasn’t one to lecture but taught by example. Paul mentions in both the text and the backmatter that Papa Chilly was the first African American to own a service station in North Carolina (his presumed dream) but not that he was killed in a robbery, which has the effect of keeping the overall tone positive and the instructional content one-dimensional. Figures in the pictures are mostly dark-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Blandly inspirational fare made to evoke equally shrink-wrapped responses. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-250-81003-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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